A Cold East Wind!

in 2022 I only managed to paint two vehicles in 20mm scale, which is extremely bad by my standards! So I thought that the best way to start this year was by getting some vehicles painted that could be included in the Paint What You Got community challenge!

So first off is a German WW2 anti-aircraft tank, the Ostwind (East Wind). They were built late in the war to provide tank units with short range anti-aircraft protection, with most using the hulls of re-conditioned Panzer IV medium tanks returned to depots for rebuilding. I like the big, angular turret, which gives it a very characteristic appearance (the earlier Wirbelwind was a similar concept).

The model is a resin 3D print from Syborg and is a very nice, crisp model (Chris over at NQM continues to be a bad influence on me, since his blog is where I first heard of Syborg). To match my old German vehicles it’s painted in overall yellow with thick stripes of red brown and medium green, both of the latter mixed with overall yellow to give them a more muted appearance (these two colours were provided to vehicle crews in the form of paste which had to be diluted before it could be used, so the colours could vary in practice. I then gave the vehicle a black/brown thinned enamel wash that was removed with a damp brush to leave a grubby/shaded finish. Last paint applied was a sandy drybrush highlight.

I had trouble with the overall yellow base coat. I normally use Humbrol 84 Mid Stone but this time round I’d got an equivalent acrylic match, but this did not cover well over the Vallejo primer coat (I opted to coat in acrylic for a change, since some resin materials don’t react well to enamels). When I tried a colour patch of enamel 84 it looked too dark, so I decided to paint the whole vehicle in Enamel 83 Ochre, which is a lighter colour than 84). This covered well, nice and matt, but I thought it looked a bit too light! So I then tried the acrylic 84 again over the enamel and it covered well, so I repainted the complete vehicle! One other change I made was to paint the tracks and suspension in Dark Earth before putting the black/brown wash on and this made these bits easier to paint for near enough the same overall mucky running gear look.

Up until this point the only close range AA protection my German forces had was provided by an SdKfz 7/2 37mm-armed half track (shown above with the Ostwind and some tank crewmen for comparison – it also shows how big the half track was). This model was converted from the Airfix SdKfz 7 tractor. Originally, back in the late ’70s (honest) I built it as the unarmoured version with a flat rear platform and scratch built 37mm gun, but in the early ’80s I added the armoured cab from plasticard and repainted it in the form you can see in the picture. I originally had two of them but gave one away when I scaled down my WW2 wargames forces when I got married. I’ve also got an optional quadruple 20mm gun to mount in place of the 37mm gun to let me field the SdKfz 7/1 variant.

While I was taking the pictures I thought I’d get my other Panzer IV models and variants out for a group shot, since there aren’t many and they don’t get out much (see picture above)! The Ostwind is the left hand model in the back row. Next to it is a Brummbar, the only other vehicle in this picture that was painted since I started this blog in 2016 (you can see it here). The vehicle rear right is the old Matchbox kit of the Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer, another ’80’s model. Front row are my Panzer IV medium tanks, all scratchbuilt in cardboard in the early ’80s (so probably 40 years old now)! They’re showing their age but they’re quite robust models and I’ve got no intention of replacing them since they’ve been through a lot in their lifetimes.

Shows how times change – back in the ’80s I used to scratchbuild the vehicles I needed, now I can get nearly every one as a kit or a 3D print! They’ve all still got to be painted (and varnished) of course!